5th CinePécs Moveast International Film Festival

This year the CinePécs Moveast International Film Festival celebrated its fifth edition with a partly changed name and a new crew. The city of Pécs which will be the capital of the European culture in 2010 – with Istanbul (Turkey) and Essen (Germany) – would like to take a major role not just in the Hungarian festival circle but also on the international stage. Though it looks that in Hungary there is a growing competition among the several international film festivals, still Pécs is the only one that has a FIPRESCI-jury – for the third time in 2009 – and a very clear goal in focusing on the region’s filmmaking.

In the competition section there were twelve Central-Eastern European first feature films this year from twelve countries. The standard is – as always – very varied but the superiority of the young Romanian film is still noticeable, not just in the competition section but while watching the Romanian panorama section as well. The stylish Bulgarian film noir Zift by Javor Gardev and the Hungarian drama Lost Times by Áron Mátyássy were also remarkable movies. Unfortunately some of the directors had not enough clear concepts and these movies were mainly about the youth and their life without a feature film length story. Without well written scripts and enough ambition, one could feel these pictures as amateurish and kind of lifestyle movies with sex-drugs-disco stories and they were also disappointing visually and lacking any deeper meaning.

After the strange decision from the crew to organize a four-day festival there were busy days in Pécs because, next to the twelve screenings of the competition section, there was also an international Béla Balázs symposium commemorating the 125th anniversary of Béla Balázs’s birth, and the 60th anniversary of the death of the theoretician, scriptwriter and critic organized by the FIPRESCI and the Film Festival. Amongst them Ronald Bergan and Thomas Rotschild had an interesting lecture on the conference.

The FIPRESCI Award went to The Other Irene (Cealalta Irina) by Romanian filmmaker Andrei Gruzsniczki. The movie, argue our jurors, “is a simple but extremely well told film. Its Kafkaesque story about a man’s great stamina in ascending a stubborn and confusing bureaucracy is universal. But it is also a very specific tale about the realities of life in Eastern Europe today, with a sensitive central performance: the humble, but never humbled man that desperately seeks the truth.” (György Kárpáti, edited by Steven Yates)

CinePécs Moveast International Film Festival: www.cinepecs.hu